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 A Special Homage to Mr. Television |
 Uncle Miltie in Motion |
 Berle in a Friars Club mood |
A day at the Friars' Club
with the irrepressible Berle
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of TheColumnists.com |
At one time Milton
Berle was the hottest comedian in America--the first American
entertainer to become a TV star when the medium was still an
enigma on the horizon of American pop culture.
Berle struck his success almost overnight, with just a handful
of shows, becoming known as "Uncle Miltie" and "Mr.
Television." In only a few months he became a national institution,
even if only one per cent of the American population had TV sets
that summer of 1948. After years of limited success as comedy
relief in movies, Broadway plays, the Ziegfeld Follies and five
failed attempts at radio comedy, he had found his place. Television,
in 1948, was a perfect medium for his visual comedy and boundless
energy.
He held the No. 1 position for just a few years because, when
the chips were down and the smoke cleared a little, Berle was
a pretty corny guy who relied mainly on put-down ad libs and
slapstick comedy enhanced by outrageous costumes, often "drag"
costumes. When he took over "The Texaco Star Theater"
in 1948 for just four weeks as a summer replacement, TV was a
brand-new medium which had yet to be explored. There were no
standards, there was no level of "taste" to which producers
could aspire. It was the wild west of video, the unexplored frontiers
of a new visual medium about which little was yet known. Berle
exploited it for all it was worth, with NBC signing him to a
30-year contract, paying him $100,000 annually whether he worked
or not.
I was one of the faithful who always watched. I'd get to my aunt's
home in Napa Valley faithfully every Tuesday night just before
8 p.m. and settle down in front of her TV set. My dad and I would
speculate about what crazy costume Berle would open the show
in. One night it was nothing but a barrel--an IRS agent had taken
everything he owned. Another night Berle came out as Lady Godiva
and pranced around in a white, tight-fitting body stocking in
front of a white charger.
I still
remember the crazy night that Berle, opening the show in a caveman
costume, rushed into the audience and plucked a fur coat off
a lady's seat, returning to the stage to prance about in the
coat. It was bizarre and it was spontaneous--and those are exactly
what made his comedy so wonderful to one as young as myself.
Yet if you looked closely at the format, it was nothing more
than an old-fashioned vaudeville potpourri of Berle, guest stars,
comedians, singers, ventriloquists, acrobats and jugglers. What
"The Ed Sullivan Show" would become years later, but
without a slapstick comic as host.
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his original TV show. Here he cavorts in an outfit even Carmen Miranda might send back to wardrobe. |
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By the mid-1950s some standards of taste were being established, and Berle's star began to dim quickly, so that by 1956 he had seen his glory days. He tried two comebacks in 1958 and 1966 but he could never regain the vast ratings he had swept up in the late 1940s. Audiences now expected more, and Berle wasn't what the public wanted any longer.
I'll be the first to recognize the corniness of Milton Berle. I know there are many who don't think he's very funny. That there was a crude edge to his work that didn't allow it to hold up for very long. But . . . I gotta tell you. I was never more excited when the opportunity came to interview Berle in 1982. I was used to interviewing celebrities for the San Francisco Chronicle, but I knew this was going to be a good one. I was right: It's still one of my fondest memories of my days as a newspaper guy, and I'd like to share it with you now.
The story is dated April 4, 1982, so it was probably sometime in March when I drove eagerly one noonday to the Friars Club in Beverly Hills. I'd been forewarned that Berle was going to be the official greeter that afternoon, so he would be very busy talking to every person who showed up for lunch.
For six years he had been president of the watering hole-social club for show biz personalities, and he was customarily seated in his corner booth, watching the door of the dining room. Almost daily he volunteered to be the host. How I was going to get any time under such circumstances worried me, so I got there a little early.
Immediately I saw Berle flitting about the room like some official gadfly, cracking jokes and being very festive and friendly. He brought an aura of dancing electricity and sense of humor to this otherwise staid establishment.
There was never a shortage of fame and talent at the Berle table. On this day, Berle was rubbing elbows with comedian Jesse White, writer-producer Buddy Arnold, his then 20-year-old son Bill Berle, and others whose names have been lost to memory. I was told that it wasn't uncommon to see Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, George Burns, Buddy Hackett or Jan Murray breaking bread with Berle.
Berle, his eight-inch cigar forever in front of his face, was never out of the spotlight. He seemed trapped in a forecefield of his own energy, even when he left his own table to join me at my booth for a hot tostada, which he never had time to eat.
I had a tape recorder with me and he insisted on stopping and starting it each time we resumed or the interview was interrupted by one of his duties. He offered me a Havana cigar which, he told me, had been especially rolled with tobacco he had purchased from the estate of the late comedian Ernie Kovacs. He kept referring to me as "Johnny" and kept sending the tostada back to the kitchen to be reheated. And he always kept his eye on the door, fully aware of who was coming and going.
Berle looked uncommonly healthy for a man of 73 years. His complexion was ruddy (when I could see it through the cloud of cigar smoke), his eyes sparkled behind his eyeglasses, and he occasionally checked his appearance by glancing into the wall of mirrors behind our booth. Narcissistic, perhaps?
He scrunched down in the booth dutifully and frequently scratched at his eyebrows as we talked. "Yeah, I know, I look good. But you know, I should work out more than I do. I spend too much time here at the club, at the expense of golf, exercising, walking. But I watch what I eat. Like this tostada, yeah, I'm watching it."
There was a sense of legend and history that instantly rubbed off Berle as he flung out some one-liners hot and fast. Always on, always the showman, laughing his way through his 64th year in show business. Berle was never far from a telephone and he bounced up for a conversation five times during our interview, shutting off my tape recorder each time. No use, he pointed out, wasting good tape.
First he talked about San Francisco, where he would perform in April in a special one-man show.
"San
Francisco," he told me, "definitely one of my favorite
cities. I first played there in 1922 at the Golden Gate Theater
with a girl named Elizabeth Kennedy. That was vaudeville. I even
remember the picture playing but I don't remember the title.
It starred Bryant Washburn. [The only movie Washburn made that
year was "Hungry Hearts."] A beautiful city, San Francisco,
I was there in `80 for `Guys and Dolls.' Did you see the show?
. . . "
I asked him what life was like over 70? "How is life? It's
been different these past few years, very different. I don't
have to push like I used to. In the early part of my career there
was only me. I was a factory working singlehandedly. Now there're
others working for me through my production company. Writers,
producers, directors. Now I pick my spots. Right now I've got
two shows on cable TV --`Magic of the Stars' with Walter Matthau
and Lucille Ball, and `Milton Berle's Mad Mad World of Comedy.'
I do benefits and roasts, sometimes three or four in one week.
Did you see me on `General Hospital?' Five appearances as a theatrical
agent. I also do the college circuit; I do seminars on comedy,
it's a cross between a monologue and a lecture. Hey, there's
also `The Best of Berle,' a 90-minute primetime special featuring
kinescopes and tapes from my old Texaco shows."
Berle didn't seem to be worried that his material might be going
out of date. On the subject of comedy his speech slowed down,
as though he was carefully articulating his thoughts before speaking.
"What you're seeing here," he said, "is Berle
the astute thinking man." He posed like some deep thinker
to punctuate the gag. "Hey, funny is funny whether it's
in color or black-and-white. Fans like you who remember me from
the old days will wax nostalgically and young people will be
discovering me for the first time." Never any ego problem
with Milton Berle, I thought, noticing that he was glancing into
the mirror behind us again.
"There's no such thing as an old joke," Berle informed
me. "There're only older audiences. A comedian is a guy
who isn't afraid of silence. For example, the timing of the great
late Jack Benny. He believed in silence . . . he could take those
pauses and he wasn't afraid of losing his audience. What do I
owe my success to? Hey, Johnny, I'm a stand-up comic; joke joke
joke fast one-liners rapidfire nonsequiturs. But to be a comedian
you have to be an actor if you want to sustain as a personality.
It's the same as sustaining in any other form of entertainment.
"Johnny, you have to ask yourself three questions. `Who
am I? What am I doing here? And . . . why?' Example: I've seen
some comics (I won't mention their names) but afterward there
was nothing there for me to take home; there was nothing about
them to remember. Now, let's talk about style: It must be indelible.
We know what Woody Allen stands for. He's the modern-day Walter
Mitty; he's an incongruity. And [John] Belushi, the guy they
just buried [he had died March 5, just a few days before this
interview], he was magnificently crazy, irreverent, a wild Mad
Hatter; he was gloriously fresh to his generation.
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as formal as it ever got on the Berle show: He dresses up for his 2nd season premiere. |
"I see young comedians at the improv shops--Comedy Star, Rising Star, Laugh Stop--and they ask me what I think. I have to say the same thing over and over: Your material, what you're doing, doesn't befit your look. You've got to look in the mirror and ask, `What should I do? What should I be?' You must have a definitive style. Just like you can't try to be someone else. There's only one Sinatra or Streisand or Garland. They threw the molds away. And when a singer goes out there to do `Over the Rainbow' or `You Made Me Love You,' it's a big mistake."
Then came the big moment, the moment that he said, "Now, let's talk about the most important subject of the day. Me, myself and I. Milton Berle. You saw me as a young fella growing up on television. So you know I deal in brashness. I know who I am. Right now, as I'm talking, I'm dissecting myself. I deal in flippancy. I'm a wise guy comedian, a put-down artist. I take care of hecklers. I walk on the sides of my face, I walk on the sides of my feet. I say tag lines and make funny faces and do physical things. Shtick, Johnny, shtick."
Berle jumped up suddenly and rushed back to the door to receive new visitors. In his absence, an old friend of Berle's named John Francis, a producer who did many shows with Berle in those days, walked over to my booth and pointed at Berle and shook his head: "That man, he's a royal pain in the ass. He's such a damn perfectionist that when we go to San Francisco next month he's gonna inject himself into every phase of the show. I'll tell you something else. He saved this club from obscurity. Six years ago it was very much in the red. He appointed committee heads, he built a crew and he became captain of the ship. Now he's here most of the time and keeps this joint alive. But still, I gotta tell you. He's one royal pain in the ass."
Berle returned and snapped the recorder back on. If he had been examining himself a few minutes before, now he was examining me under the Berle microscope. "How long have you been doing these interviews?" he asked, leaning in closely to look me square in the eye. "What enjoyment do you get out of doing these things? How come you've spent all these years talking to people like me? You must get something out of it." Suddenly I realized that Berle had switched the roles and now he was interviewing me.
It took me a while to get the interview back on track, and only after I'd answered some of those questions. I asked him about his so-called "retirement."
"I wouldn't be in any other business," he said. "It's a little late for me to open a used car lot. Someone asked George Burns when he was going to retire, and George replied `To what?' I have the same answer. See, I'm still stealing other people's material.
"Hey, Johnny, you need a joke? I have the largest file of jokes in the United States . . . hell, in the world. In my office, six and a half million jokes, indexed and cross-indexed on cards. I have every burlesque sketch ever written. Off the top of my head, I can remember 200,000 gags."
I asked him about his 30-year, $6-million guaranteed contract with NBC, which had finally expired the previous August. There was an unusual degree of melancholy and disappointment that crept into Berle's voice: "My contract stated that NBC could have used me as a producer, director, writer, executive or consultant. But they blew it, Johnny! They blew it! Because in all those 30 years they never once called upon me for anything other than my comedy acting. They never put me upstairs as an executive in charge of comedy shows, or asked me if a script was suitable for a week or four weeks or a full-blown series. I was never used as an adviser, yet I could have given them so much more than I did."
But that's all behind him, he says, becoming lighter again. "Hey, Johnny, my philosophy is simple. To live and enjoy, day by day. To always have my work and my family." He smiled and looked very contented, and waved across the room at a new arrival. "I only hope I live to be as old as Henny Youngman's material."
Postscript: Milton Berle came to San Francisco that April for an "All-Star Show" at Masonic Auditorium. It had been planned by a city synagogue as a way of raising money for renovations. But Berle had not pulled a large audience during the two-night show and the synagogue ended up losing money.
The committee went to Berle afterward and asked him if he would return some of his fee, which had totaled $60,000. Berle responded with a flat-out "No."
"Hey,"
he told them, "we made a deal. I was supposed to perform
and I did. Now you have to live up to your end of it." And
the $60,000 stayed in his bank account, and the synagogue never
got renovated that year.
© 2002 by John Stanley.
The Berle portrait is from Gaylord Production Co. The scenes
from the Berle Texaco series are from NBC.
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